Others in Japanese Agriculture: Koreans, Evacuees and Migrants 1920–1950 by Yasuoka Ken'ichi

Abstract

Reviewed by: Others in Japanese Agriculture: Koreans, Evacuees and Migrants 1920–1950 by Yasuoka Ken'ichi Tessa Morris-Suzuki Others in Japanese Agriculture: Koreans, Evacuees and Migrants 1920–1950. By Yasuoka Ken'ichi. Translated by Teresa Castelvetere. Kyoto University Press/ Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2018. 374 pages. Hardcover, ¥4,100/ A$84.95. Particularly since the 1990s, the once-prevalent images of Japan as an ethnically homogeneous nation have been subjected to extensive scholarly scrutiny and criticism. [End Page 127] Many studies have shed light on the presence of colonial migrants in Japanese towns and cities and on the struggles of Okinawans, Ainu, and other minorities for recognition. But the critique has rarely extended to rural village society in Honshu, Kyushu, or Shikoku. The image of agriculture and farm villages as relatively homogeneous bedrocks of Japanese tradition, therefore, remains strong. Yasuoka Ken'ichi's meticulously researched study—originally published in Japanese in 2014—offers a powerful challenge to that image.1 Examining the transwar period from the 1920s to the start of the 1950s and focusing mainly on rural areas of Kyoto Prefecture and surrounding regions, Yasuoka explores the histories of various groups of "others" whose presence has complicated the modern history of the Japanese village. In doing so, he sheds powerful new light on Japanese agricultural history as a whole. The most eye-opening section of this study is its relatively long first chapter, which explores the story of Korean migrants in Japanese agriculture. As Yasuoka demonstrates, although the colonial-era flow of Korean migration into Japan was mostly directed toward urban industrial areas, by the 1930s substantial numbers of Koreans were also working as farm laborers. The total number of Koreans engaged in agriculture was not very great when compared to the total size of Japan's rural population, but in some areas Koreans constituted a significant percentage of the workforce of landless agricultural laborers, particularly of sakuotoko and sakuonna (farm laborers employed on a yearly basis). For example, Yasuoka calculates that by 1930 Koreans accounted for 31.9% of these farm workers in Yamaguchi Prefecture and 40.3% in Nara Prefecture (pp. 32–33). As Japan slid further into war in the late 1930s—and as Japanese farmers left the land to join the military, migrate to the colonies, or work in urban war industries—a growing number of Korean farm laborers obtained leases on abandoned farmland and began to establish a more permanent presence in rural villages. A few even became rural landowners in their own right. This seriously alarmed the Japanese authorities, who perceived the villages as wellsprings of ethnic purity from which the next generation of warriors would be born, but the rhetoric of naisen ittai—"Japan and Korea as one body"—made it difficult for them to condemn the trend in public. Yasuoka's careful study of Terada village in Kyoto Prefecture shows how Korean tenant farmers and their Japanese landlords and neighbors interacted and how preexisting local institutions were adjusted in response to the changing rural social structure. After Japan's defeat in war, many of the Korean farmers returned to the Korean Peninsula, but some remained, their presence becoming an issue of controversy during the postwar land-reform process initiated by the Allied Occupation. The "others" who feature in this book, though, are not necessarily non-Japanese. Yasuoka also highlights how intranational and cross-border mobility affected Japanese villages in other ways, creating various categories of "outsider" whose presence enhanced social dynamism but also sometimes gave rise to social tensions. The first of these groups, examined in Chapter 2, consisted of the wartime evacuees from urban or suburban areas who flooded into farm villages in huge numbers during the [End Page 128] Asia-Pacific War. The scale of this human movement was indeed staggering: some five million people moved out of the major urban evacuation zones nationwide, and two and a half million were evacuated from Tokyo alone. Yasuoka reminds us of the sufferings of these evacuees, who often found themselves unemployed, isolated from friends and family, and living in harsh and unfamiliar conditions. But here, as in his discussion of other groups of "outsiders," he is also at pains to...